Piyush Kumar Sharma

My research broadly encompasses security, systems, and networks. Specifically, I develop frameworks, perform large-scale measurements, and build systems for deploying and facilitating the use of privacy-enhancing technologies.

I am currently working as a senior research fellow at the University of Michigan with Prof. Roya Ensafi. Earlier, I worked as a Postdoctoral researcher at COSIC, KU Leuven, in Belgium, with Prof. Claudia Diaz. I completed my PhD from IIIT Delhi, India with the thesis titled 'Building Performant, Privacy-enhancing and Blocking-resistant Communication Systems'

Latest News

• [May 2025] Paper accepted at PETS 2025.
• [November 2024] Two papers accepted at NDSS 2025.
• [July 2024] Excited to obtain the FOCI Rising Star Award 2024.
• [February 2024] Presented our work LARMix at NDSS symposium 2024.
• [December 2023] Delivered an invited talk about my work on Internet shutdowns at Splintercon
• [September 2023] Paper accepted at ACM IMC 2023

See all the latest news

Publications

• CenPush: Blocking-Resistant Communication Using Push Notifications
  Piyush Kumar Sharma, Diwen Xue, Aaron Ortwein, Cecylia Bocovich, Harry and Roya Ensafi
  To appear in proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2025
• LAMP: Lightweight Approaches for Latency Minimization in Mixnets with Practical Deployment Considerations [link]
  Mahdi Rahimi, Piyush Kumar Sharma and Claudia Diaz
  In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2025
• The Discriminative Power of Cross-layer RTTs in Fingerprinting Proxy Traffic [link]
  Diwen Xue, Robert Stanley, Piyush Kumar Sharma and Roya Ensafi
  In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2025
• Is Custom Congestion Control a Bad Idea for Circumvention Tools?
  Wayne Wang, Diwen Xue, Piyush Kumar Sharma, Ayush Mishra, Anonymous, and Roya Ensafi
  In Free and Open Communication over the Internet (FOCI), co-located with Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2025
• LARMix: Latency-Aware Routing in Mix Networks [link]
  Mahdi Rahimi, Piyush Kumar Sharma and Claudia Diaz
  In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2024
• PTPerf: On the Performance Evaluation of Tor Pluggable Transports [link]
  Zeya Umayya, Dhruv malik, Devashish Gosain and Piyush Kumar Sharma
  In proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023
• On the Anonymity of Peer-To-Peer Network Anonymity Schemes Used by Cryptocurrencies [link]
  Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain and Claudia Diaz
  In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2023
• Dolphin: A Cellular Voice Based Internet Shutdown Resistance System [link]
  Piyush Kumar Sharma, Rishi Sharma, Kartikey Singh, Mukulika Maity and Sambuddho Chakravarty
  In proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2023
• Camoufler: Accessing The Censored Web By Utilizing Instant Messaging Channels [link]
  Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain, Sambuddho Chakravarty
  In Proceedings of ACM Asia Conference on Communication and Computer Security (AsiaCCS 2021).
• The Road Not Taken: Re-thinking the Feasibility of Voice Calling Over Tor [link]
  Piyush Kumar Sharma, Shashwat Chaudhary*, Nikhil Hassija*, Mukulika Maity, and Sambuddho Chakravarty
  In Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2020). (* Equal contribution of authors)
• SiegeBreaker: An SDN Based Practical Decoy Routing System [link]
  Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain, Himanshu Sagar, Chaitanya Kumar, Aneesh Dogra, Vinayak Naik, H.B. Acharya, and Sambuddho Chakravarty
  In Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2020).
• Maginot Lines and Tourniquets: On the Defendability of National Cyberspace [link]
  Devashish Gosain, Madhur Rawat, Piyush Kumar Sharma, H.B. Acharya
  In proceedings of Local Computer Networks (LCN Symposium 2020).
• Where The Light Gets In: Analyzing Web Censorship Mechanisms in India [link]
  Tarun Kumar Yadav*, Akshat Sinha*, Devashish Gosain*, Piyush Kumar Sharma, Sambuddho Chakravarty
  In proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018). (*Shared First Authorship)
• SiegeBreaker: SDN Based Decoy Routing System [link]
  Piyush Kumar Sharma, Chaitanya Kumar, Aneesh Dogra, Vinayak Naik, H.B. Acharya, Sambuddho Chakravarty
  WIP published in ACSAC 2017.

Academic Service

• PC 2026: Usenix Security, IEEE S&P
• PC 2025: Usenix Security, PETS, TheWebConf (formerly WWW), Euro S&P
• PC 2024: CCS, PETS, TheWebConf (formerly WWW), WiSec, FOCI
• PC 2023: PETS
• PC 2022: ESORICS
• External Reviewer: PETS 2022, PETS 2021

Teaching

• WINTER 2025 - Substitute Lecturer for 588- Computer & Network Security at University of Michigan
• FALL 2023 - Delivered a lecture on VPNs as part of the Privacy Technologies course at KU Leuven
• WINTER 2023 - Co-taught Advanced Privacy Technologies course at KU Leuven
• FALL 2022 - Taught the complete course and lectures for Privacy Technologies and co-taught Privacy and Big Data course at KU Leuven
• FALL 2021 - Took lecture on Censorship and Anti-censorship technologies for the Privacy Technologies course at KU Leuven